Freemans' Selvage Denim and Canvas

Pretty much anytime I'm within a four-block radius of Freemans down on Manhattan's Lower East Side, I make a point of swinging by the place—for everything from a quick haircut to a drink and a bite to eat. On my most recent drive-by, though, I ran into Kent Kilroe, Taavo Somer's partner in the operation, who pointed me toward some very cool-looking denim piled on a display table. And while this isn't the first time Freemans has offered jeans, it's their first time working with selvage from the American masters of the material: Cone Mills in North Carolina.

"We try to produce everything we do in New York," Kilroe told me, "but Cone Mills is the best, so we get our denim there and ship it to Blue Ridge, Georgia, where the jeans are made at a factory that's been turning out jeans for longer than I've been alive." The store's carrying two versions—the Indigo, cut from raw, dark 13-ounce selvage denim (above left), and the Neverfade, in a super-rare, fiber-dyed canvas selvage (right). The canvas is dyed before it's woven into a yarn, which makes the fabric much more resistant to fading.

Both jeans are cut slim, but not Williamsburg-hipster skinny, with a medium rise. "They're patterned after a classic Levi's with a slimmer leg—not a tapered leg," Kilroe says. They're also notable for what they don't have: Namely, rivets, embroidered pockets, leather patches on the waistband, or logos of any kind.

Freemans offers free hemming by their in-house tailor, though Kilroe goes native with his. "I roll mine up, and I'm kind of notorious for being gross," he says. "I'll go six to eight months without washing them, and when they get kind of gnarly—and they do—I'll throw 'em in the freezer overnight, which kills whatever's in there."

Also new at the store: a rare Japanese-designed, Japanese-made version of a P.F. Flyers sneaker originally put on the market in 1940 (below). Freemans is the only place on the East Coast selling them, and the U.S. supply is limited to 500 pairs.